A wide variety of blade configurations for vehicles such skid steerers, tractors or the like for plowing or scraping material such as snow are available and in use. These include straight bladed plows of the type shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,250,026, and center-hinged, V-plows of the type shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,035,944. Other straight bladed plows have been devised with one or both ends being slidably extendable as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,807,064. Yet other plows have included straight blades with pivotable, non-extendable ends as shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,425,196, 6,412,199, and 2,556,592. U.S. Pat. No. 5,573,071 shows one plow having permanently forwardly angled plow ends, wherein the entire plow swings from side to side so as to angle the entire plow left or right.
While each of the above types of prior known plows is useful in one or more situations, a blade design flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of different applications has been lacking in the art.
The type of blade configuration that has a variable width has proven to be useful in the art for a number of different reasons. Besides providing the ability to plow and scrape sites of varying sizes such as parking lots or narrower sidewalks, this type of a configuration has facilitated the transport of the vehicles carrying such blades. For example, for vehicle-mounted plows which must be transported from one site to another for clearing snow or other plowable materials, it is necessary that the plow be narrow enough to allow transport on public highways which have limited lane width. However, when actually engaged in plowing, it is very desirable that the plow have an extended width so that larger areas such as parking lots or other sites can be cleared of snow more quickly.
Another type of a blade configuration, one utilizing pivotable ends, has proven useful in preventing spillover of plowable material from the blade edges. In this type of a blade design, it has been considered essential to provide for independent pivotability of each end such that one end can be pivoted in while the other pivoted out for angled plowing operations where the snow is directed to one or the other side.
While many innovative blade configurations have been developed in the art, a design that makes it possible to effectively and easily clean areas such as the edge of a wall or a dead end alleyway by pulling a charge of material backwards from a confined area has been lacking.
What is needed in the art is a blade configuration flexible enough to combine all the known useful features of the current plow designs with the ability to plow materials from sites such as dead end alleyways. Such needs include a short enough plow length to allow transportation on public highways, a long enough length for fast, efficient clearing of a large job site, means to carry or push plowable material from one area to another without letting the plowed material slip off the plow ends, at the same time allowing for angled plowing, and the ability to effectively clean all the way up to walls and sites such as dead end alleyways. All of these needs should be met while minimizing the cost, size, and space required for the plow in each of its arrangements.
The present invention addresses the described deficiencies of prior art blade configurations for material plowing and scraping by providing a relatively simple, reliable, and cost effective blade assembly flexible enough to be used for a wide variety of applications.